(Jewish Group) Why Jewish compassion shouldn't just apply to human animals

Marc Bekoff, an American Jewish biologist and professor emeritus at the University of Colorado, Boulder, has studied coyotes, dogs, penguins, fish, grosbeaks, and jays to understand their thoughts and emotions from a perspective of interdependence akin to the German Jewish philosopher Martin Buber’s “I and Thou.” Benjamin Ivry spoke to Bekoff from his home in Colorado about his lifelong study of why animals behave the way they do and what it means and about his new book “ A Dog’s World.”

You’ve stated that as a kid born in Flatbush, Brooklyn at the end of World War II, your Russian Jewish immigrant family advocated compassion and nonviolence for people, and you “just extended it to animals.” Was the motivation like Edgar Kupfer-Koberwitz, who after surviving Dachau concentration camp, found that his ordeals made him empathetic to other creatures’ sufferings?

Wow. I do like to think that compassion for humans spills over to compassion for nonhumans, but likely the reverse is also true. A lot of people with Russian Jewish surnames I’ve met fit the bill. My grandparents and parents all read the Yiddish Forverts religiously, so to speak, and were very compassionate, empathetic people. I also drew inspiration from my first cousin, the historian Robert Caro, whose mom was my mother’s sister. Bob’s always been my model for precision. Just be careful, he would tell me. Even if no one else knows whether something you write is correct, you’ll know.

Your “Encyclopedia of Animal Rights and Animal Welfare” notes that “Jews are required to make sure that their animals have been fed before sitting down to eat.” You’ve also cited studies mentioning that among homeless people, dogs eat first and “absorb empathy.” Might this prioritizing of dogs among Jews and homeless people be due to the history of the Jewish diaspora, involving a displaced, exiled people?

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